“Mental Space Mapping in Classical Chinese Poetry: A Cognitive Approach” Professor

1 Introduction Primary verbal composite modelling, as manifested in cognitive poetry, raises serious theoretical questions over the nature and function of the linguistic sign (Stockwell 2002). If language as a conventional symbolic system qualifies as the Peircian Thirdness, it cannot possibly be at the same time a Firstness. Rather than getting once again into the infinitely boring debate on the naturalness or arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, or compromising himself by opting for a both-and solution, the author of this chapter has chosen to delve into the empiricism of reading classical Chinese poetry, mainly that produced before and in the Tang Dynasty of the seventh and eighth centuries, where the special use of imagistic language, quite different from its various English counterparts, has evoked heated debate on poetic iconicity over the past four decades. The debate has been complicated by the supposedly 'ideographic' (and popularly but wrongly held 'iconographic') nature of the Chinese writing system which has remained virtually unchanged since the second century when the script was codified. A classic statement on poetic diction in the 1971s reads: " Chinese nouns are close approximations of universals. " (Kao and Mei 1971: 104). The underlying assumption is a kind of simplistic iconicity existing between substantives-" unadorned archetypal nouns "-and natural phenomena (Kao and Mei 1971: 81). The above statement was made, ironically, during the heyday of structural linguistics and poetics when they were belatedly introduced and applied to the study At the same time, such lexical and syntactical iconicity, when introduced into the Chinese speaking world, was warmly received by traditional interpreters, who, harbouring a similar vision of mimesis, found the idea congenial to their favorite shi hua (i.e. 'poetic talks' or critical fragments), such as qing jing jiao rong (" emotion and scenery convergence "), jing jie (" poetic boundary "), etc. The irony lies in the fact that, in the 1960s and 1970s, structural poetics based on the Saussurian linguistic model did not catch on and has never taken root, probably due to traditional literary scholars' general lack of training and interest in linguistic analysis and suspicion of linguistics-informed poetics, especially when it is imported from the West. The only exception is probably Kao and Mei (1978), but their application remains largely eclectic, marred by burdens of the past. Curiously, the next paradigm, cognitive linguistics, has rarely been appropriated to deal with classical poetry either, partly because it …